It has long been known that striking artistic effects can be achieved by pictures capable of representing a landscape or the like in the daylight and also at night. Traditionally, this has been achieved by providing small translucent apertures in an opaque surface carrying the picture, at those points where lights would appear at night in the scene. These apertures are not noticeable in the overall effect of the scene when an observer looks at it in daylight; but when they are backlighted in a darkened room, the picture assumes a nighttime appearance. This type of picture is particularly effective for the representation of distant scenes such as, for example, the scene of a city viewed from a hill or across a body of water. When such a scene is observed in nature, thermal currents in the air between the observer and the city cause increasingly distant lights to increasingly twinkle in a familiar manner which is difficult to reproduce.
Attempts have been made to reproduce the twinkling of stars in day-night pictures (see U.S. Pat. No. 3,688,424 to Von Zanten); the twinkling of sunlight on water (by the relative movement of a picture carrier and a grid); or a change in appearance of a picture by using movable backlighting reflectors (see U.S. Pat. No. 4,034,494 to Lane). None of these technologies, however, are capable of satisfactorily reproducing the appearance of a distant city scene at night.